Here is a story from the olden days of Chicago politics, followed by some modern variants as recent as last week’s federal indictment of U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski.
The new man at the Chicago Corporation Counsel’s office back in 1958 came from 3rd Ward Democratic Committeeman Ralph Metcalfe’s organization, which made him well-connected, something everyone knew.
He showed up for the first week of work, recalls a fellow attorney, “going like a house on fire, scheduling depositions, working the files, you name it.”
Then he cooled down, coming in for work only two times a month to collect his paycheck. People would visit for legal business, and someone else would have to read up on the case and pick up the slack.
Then he cooled down even more, showing up only once a month to pick up both paychecks.
Then he just stopped coming in at all, asking the Corporation Counsel’s office to simply mail the checks to his house in Waukegan because the commute downtown was too much of a hassle.
Now that’s a ghost payroller, just as bad 3 1/2 decades ago as the ghost payrollers of today. Of course, it was a different time, says Richard Troy, a former assistant corporation counsel who seems to delight in relating this story in some detail.
“Harold never denied he was a ghost up there in the Corporation Counsel’s office,” says Troy. “He was connected.”
Harold?
The late Mayor Harold Washington.
Chicago has always had a peculiar affinity for illegal practices that have sent people to jail with regularity over the years in places where residents and prosecutors had a lower level of tolerance for official corruption.
The indictment of Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), which includes a whole batch of ghost-employee counts, has already revived the debate over this curious component of American political history.
Chicago’s political culture traditionally viewed the payroll, be it local, state or federal, as a jobs and income-support program.
Sometimes it was for the well-connected who never showed up for work, sometimes for people who took jobs in exchange for loyalty, and sometimes for mopes and relatives.
When former Mayor Jane Byrne wanted to put an ally, Rosemary Janus, in an unpaid spot on the Chicago Board of Education, for example, she also gave her a $35,000 position as chief of Navy Pier, a job with no office or duties.
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Once this became public, the scheme evaporated. But it was the intent that mattered most.
“If you can’t help your friends,” asked the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, “who should you help? Your enemies?”
Federal prosecutors have aggressively disagreed over the years when the “help” involved using public money for private work, or in some cases, for no work.
The biggest part of the federal case against Rostenkowski rests on the charge that 14 people got federal money they should never have received. They range from an elderly woman who baby-sat for the family to a firefighter who took pictures of Rostenkowski’s public and private events, to a carpenter who fixed up his house.
The tab over two decades or so allegedly runs to about half a million dollars. In some of the cases, federal authorities charge, the so-called “ghosts” were paid for work they didn’t do. In other cases, they got federal money for what amounted to personal services for Rostenkowski and his family.
Rostenkowski has denied any wrongdoing, and attorneys for 9 of the 14 alleged “ghosts” say they did work of some kind.
The Rostenkowski indictment has touched off curious debates, with defenders arguing that what the federal investigators have actually uncovered, once again, is Chicago-style politics playing out over time.
This is the “clash of cultures” school that would cite the late Mayor Daley on the value of friendship in defending whatever Rostenkowski may have done.
Critics, among them reformers who have been trying to end these kinds of practices for decades, view this differently. Even petty corruption is corruption nonetheless, they argue.
Further, they charge that the real offense Rostenkowski should answer for is his coziness with special interests-insurance and banking lobbies, for example-who have legally contributed millions of dollars to his political funds over the years he has run the Ways and Means Committee.
This divergence of viewpoints is likely to continue right up until the day a federal jury decides on the charges, assuming the case reaches trial. Should he be punished, it is inevitable that one camp will call it a terrible shame and the other will argue the whole effort missed the larger point.
The definition of corruption has a rich and varied history in American politics, where the parameters of acceptable behavior have generally been very wide.
Northwestern University historian Robert H. Wiebe notes, for example, that Daniel Webster was getting money from the Second Bank of the United States while he was arguing for its charter on the floor of the Senate. But Webster didn’t think he was corrupt, and neither did anyone else.
Many of the original American patriots, Wiebe notes, eagerly accepted pocket and expense money from the French during the Revolution as a subsidy to supplement their meager or non-existent revolutionary government pay.
“In fact, up until the 20th Century there were all kinds of not unacceptable ways for people to fatten their income through what we would now consider somewhat dubious enterprises,” Wiebe said. Time passed and reform worked its ways on political values.
In this century, Wiebe said, political values have changed so much that Rostenkowski faces a different standard, with the central question not being guilt or innocence, but one of character.
“The Rostenkowski case is sort of a minor theme in corruption but not an inconsequential one,” he said. “You only want to elect to public office people who are themselves honest and who have good character. And one of the ways we know whether they have good character is whether they have their hand in the till or not.
“In his case, the argument will not just be did he break the law, but is this man’s character so undermined by what is revealed that we find him disreputable and unacceptable?”
Measured that way, questions about who was on the payroll, whether they worked or not, the whole spectrum of charges in the 17-count federal indictment take on a different weight. Accepted political practice or not, the record shows ghost payrollers have always caused big problems for their sponsors.
Not showing up for work too often in a government job has never been legal. But if there is a special place in either hell or heaven for departed ghost payrollers, it is most likely very crowded.
Ghost payrolling has been a part of big city politics at least since the birth of New York’s old Tammany Hall, which more than 150 years ago perfected a process that passed public funds to whole armies of hacks, bums, brutes, worthies and hopefuls waiting for that next big election.
Chicago, of course, has had many variants on the theme.
There is City Council “wife swapping,” for example, in which one alderman’s spouse shows up on another alderman’s payroll. When this variant was revealed a decade ago, the cast of characters was characteristically blunt about the reasons.
“I’m embarrassed about the fact that I make so little money, my wife has to take a job,” said Ald. Bernard Stone (50th), whose wife had a job on the City Council rules committee.
Ald. Bobby Rush, now a congressman, explained having an in-law on the payroll this way: “It’s tough to find people you can trust.”
And it was only in 1990 that former Cook County Republican Chairman James Dvorak was convicted of fraud charges involving the Cook County Sheriff’s office, where he was a top aide. Federal prosecutors collected the names of dozens of ghost payrollers in that investigation.
The judge who sentenced Dvorak said he sold his office “as soon as he got it.” Dvorak, a Chicago police detective for 25 years, said it was only when he became a politician that “I lost my way.”
One of Cook County’s biggest ghost-payroll scams collapsed just last year, when former City Clerk Walter Kozubowski pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. His ghosts cost taxpayers more than $1 million.
Again, the argument that the city’s political history somehow justified the practice was implied in Kozubowski’s attorney’s argument to the court.
“It’s not like he was selling dope. He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t rob anyone. He didn’t rape anyone,” Kozubowski’s lawyer, Lawrence O’Gara, said.
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Federal Judge James Zagel ignored that argument and gave Kozubowski five years in prison.